Mobile communication devices, such as cellular phones and the like, have become increasingly prevalent. These devices provide the convenience of a handheld communication device with increased functionality. An expanding variety of additional features have become available, for example, short or multimedia messaging, multimedia playback, electronic mail, audio-video capturing, interactive gaming, data manipulation, web browsing, and the like. Other enhancements, such as, location-awareness features, e.g., global position system (GPS) tracking, enable mobile communication devices to monitor their position and present their location via a local display.
These devices can connect to a variety of information and media sources such as the Internet, enabling users to watch movies, read and write text messages and emails, as well as engage in phone calls, at times concurrently. As the complexity of these applications increase, the complexity of the user interface increases commensurately. Mobile devices have been developed in a variety of configurations, with various display options. Convenience and ease of use continue to be objectives for improvement. The focus of the structural design of mobile phones continues to stress compactness of size, incorporating powerful processing functionality within smaller and slimmer phones.
The variety of available user application features requires a greater degree of user input for interactive functionality. It has become an increasingly greater challenge for the user to manage and control the use of displays, particularly when the mobile devices support numerous applications that need to be optimized for the particular display configurations. The traditional keypad input implementation may be sufficient to meet interactivity needs when only a single display is necessary.
However, as it becomes more desirable or necessary for the user to be able to view a plurality of display images simultaneously, there is an increasing need for a more robust and user friendly display management capability. Handheld devices are being provided with a plurality of displays that can be individually controlled to display images which may be independent of each other or may be interrelated. Applications that require simultaneous display of a plurality of images are not amenable to traditional keypad input if the keypad is obstructed from view.
A need thus exists for continued development of display management capability.